There are a couple of ways you can try Linux before installing it on your hard drive. One way is to use a live cd, another way is to run it on Windows. Damn Small Linux has a version designed to run directly from Windows. Read more.
Running Linux on Windows
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Just what I’ve been looking for! Without a functioning CD burner, and without any funds to purchase a decent one any time soon, this is a great and easy way to try this out. Well, we’ll see how it works out as I am downloading this as I write this. Thanks for the heads up.
wow, the ‘read more’ says ‘download, unpack, click on batch file’.
wow! lots to read. great technical explanations, wonderful info on how it works. AWESOME!
super article.
No. I wanted to say that a good CDRW drive costs less than Doom3 nowadays – very very inexpensive for such a useful thing.
Oh, it’s an absolutely marvellous article! My favourite part is the “RTFM” link on the right.
but he just send he couldn’t afford it. if he said that then he probably already looked into the costs – why make someone feel bad about it.
What exactly is meant by “running Linux on Windows”? You aren’t actually running it under Windows, are you?
:s/send/said
There are more practical and smart way to learn linux: using a livecd distribution like knoppix, kurumin or alike. You will get tons of applications and then, if you want you can install it on hard-disk.
In my country everybody wants the opposite: run windows applications on linux because windows is expensive, insecure and unstable.
Wouldn’t a DamnSmall Linux setup with http://www.colinux.org/ be faster?
Bruno
All the ease of use of Linux combined with the stability and power of Windows.
I am typing this under Damn Small Linux running under Windows. It is unusable. It runs a billion times slower than the latest SUSE under the latest VMWARE. It is useless to promote Linux this way. Clueless users will assume that this is how Linux runs and never touch it again.
Why?
I’m in DSL on Windows right now. Sure its a little slow, but it is usable enough to get the feel for Linux and maybe some light testing of apps. Nothing you’d want to use as a gaming rig. Oh and I can’t see the bottom of my screen
Now you can put a linux distro on a USB stick (or a laptop drive with a USB case) sit down on any computer and fire it up without having to worry about USB boot support or even having to reboot the machine. That is perfect for when you want your personal desktop kept in your pocket without having the cost/space of a laptop.
The only problem is it’s kind of slow. Has anybody tried qemu-fast? Would it work with WinXP as host and Linux as guest? How about colinux (as mentioned above)?
hey why not run colinux instead? installation is not newbie friendly though. but it allows you to run linux at full speed within windows! i’m running it to try out mono serve out asp.net pages using debian
I have a 8x CDR/RW (PANASONIC CW7585B 8X4X32 CD-RW ATAPI/E-IDE) sitting in my spare parts box that you can have if you don’t mind getting such a slow burner. Works with the freeware CD Burner XP Pro 3 software. If you’re interested, let me know.
DSL has some nice options i hear. One of them includes boot entirely into ram. For those of us who have alot of ram this will reduce the latency people were talking about.
That’s a kind offer, VonSkippy. I don’t mind a slow burner at all. My last cd-burner just quit on me. I think it’s days are done, and for reasons I won’t go into here, for the coming months I likely will not spend a dime on computer parts. Please send me an e-mail to the above (e-mail account) about it. My only concern is the cost of shipping.
Anyway, back to DSL. I tried it under windows 2000, and it froze at QEMU and I was unable to even write anything at the command prompt. I’m no computer expert, however, I am venturing a guess that my slow home computer (450 MHZ) may be the culprit. I’ll check out colinux, too. Thanks to those who mentioned it.
TopologiLinux is based on slack 10 and installs on an image file in your windows file system (fat or ntfs)and adds a link on xp boot menu. I always have toplogi on my windows machines for rescue perposes.
Reference: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=dsl
FWIW, Damn Small will run about 10x faster booting directly from a CD, and about 20-30x faster in RAM. It is a lightning fast distro when not in Qemu.
don’t forget… you can also preview any linux distro by downloading (try http://www.linuxiso.org) it (that is, the image file [iso]) to your hdd, and run it in a loopback interface (for linux).. for windows, get a copy of vmware (free), or virtualpc (not free.. but i think there’s a free trial deal).. and running it in that. it’s virtual, and probably won’t run as smooth as dsl, because it’s embedded, and such.. but it’ll work.
oh, and i think there’s vmware for *nix, too.. i’m fairly sure.
livecds are a sweet option too… mandrake move, knoppix, suse, etc, etc…